“What about you, teacher, what will you do?”
“I’ll do what I’ve always done.”
You don’t ask anything more of a man than to do his duty. In the snow or the wind or on horseback or a racetrack with fast cars zipping by just inches away. “I’ll do what I’ve always done.” Which is what? What is it that you did, Cosmo? Why didn’t you ever tell us, loud and clear? Why didn’t you at least tell me, in secret, I who was your favorite pupil? He who does good in concealment, without boasting of it, is surely admirable, but in that way he’ll never teach anyone a thing. You ought to be able to see him, imitate him, learn from him. Sooner or later, discretion will kill the discreet man. Cosmo’s red sweater, as it turned out, fit me perfectly. It kept me warm, in spite of the fact that it was soaking wet. It helped me to stay afloat, even after darkness fell and I could no longer see the shore, or the boat, or my teacher.
11
THERE’S A TYPE OF mental or spiritual Fascist who believes he can forge reality with the strength of his will. With his resolute spirit. Forge, that’s right, “forge” is exactly the right verb: it gives the idea of the blisteringly hot temperatures, of the sledgehammer blows, of the showers of sparks with which one bends a recalcitrant material to one’s will. The examples are of Roman origin, such as Mucius Scaevola, or else they’re Asian—the master of martial arts who smashes stacks of bricks with his forehead or remains solidly planted on both feet while seven others try to shove him aside.
In our class there was one like that, still in the apprenticeship phase.
Ferrazza was a pudgy boy, his nose sprinkled with freckles, who had a fuzzy pronunciation of the letter “r,” so that it sounded like a “v,” quite effeminate. His fascism consisted in an adoration of the real man, and a real man is what he decided to be, no two ways about it. Decisive and disciplined. There are no limits that can stand in the way of a real man’s will if it is driven by an authentic inner strength, calm and unyielding. All sensations can be manipulated: they are under our control and it’s entirely up to us whether we enjoy or suffer, dominate or be dominated. Therefore Ferrazza came to school in January in nothing but shirtsleeves. A light shirt made of multicolored silk, always the same. He never wore an overcoat, not even a sweater. In order to ensure that people took note of his imperturbability, his utter indifference to the foolish conventions that lesser souls call “winter” or “spring,” he would stand, arms folded across his chest, in shirtsleeves, motionless in the middle of the courtyard during recess, where all the others, however soundly bundled up they might be, kept moving urgently to warm up, slapping their hands against their thighs. Not him, he stood there unruffled, with a faint smile on his face, a smile veined with scorn. If someone asked him, “Hey, Ferrazza, aren’t you cold standing there in shirtsleeves?” he’d reply, condescendingly, in that accent of his that put “v” in place of “r”: “Cold? Cold, me? Why on eavth should I be?” and then he’d extinguish his laughter, turning serious. “Maybe you’ve cold, but I’m cevtainly not.”
“Ferrazza, I’m cold because it is cold . . .”
Ferrazza would shake his head.
These stupid materialists, he would think, when will they learn their lesson? When will they take off the blinders that keep them from seeing?
“No, you’ve cold because . . . because you believe that you’ve cold, because you want to be cold,” he replied with a patience inspired by his spiritual compassion. “You see all the others weaving an ovehcoat, you know that it’s winteh, so you convince youhself that it’s vight to feel cold . . . not because you veally feel cold. You go along with what the masses believe, ov actually . . . what the masses demand that you think.”
“Masses? What masses are you talking about?”
Ferrazza would respond with a shrug.
“Maybe so. You might be right, Ferrazza. Even so, though, today it’s fucking cold out.”
Arbus and I avoided him because we felt sorry for him. Except for touting his philosophy of imperturbability and spiritual control, he wasn’t capable of doing anything at all, he was practically flunking every subject, he was a terrible soccer player and he swam like a marionette, in part because he insisted on attacking every challenge, so different each from the other, with the same identical samurai spirit, the spirit of a rigid and solemn samurai. Whenever he got his hands on the ball, in volleyball, he’d unfailingly send it straight up to hit the gymnasium ceiling.
Almost no one could stand being around him, yet he had convinced himself that it was he, with his magnetism, who rejected all the others and kept them at a safe distance. There was no joking around on this matter. “Pvoximity vendehs evevything so vulgah. Because . . . only at a distance can you be my stah,” he loved to state with an air of mystery.
HE STRUCK THE POSES of a shaman or a dictator. He believed he was capable of summoning up whatever he desired with the sheer force of his mind. He declared that he was capable of controlling himself whatever the situation, however critical. And then he extinguished within himself all passion, all emotion, with a simple act of will. This was the Fascist comrade Ferrazza.
FERRAZZA HAD HIS MOMENT when he turned in his essay in Italian class; in it he claimed that the greatest man in history had been ADOLF HITLER. Signor Cosmo read it and threw it in his face.
12
THERE’S NOT REALLY ALL that much to be said about the general outline of the politics of those years. In the administrative elections of 1974 the votes for the Christian Democrats (Democrazia Cristiana, or DC) fell and fell, while the Communists’ kept rising . . . until their respective shares were so close as to graze, almost to touch: only a couple of percentage points separated them. The Communists seemed bound to overtake their rivals, the next year there would be a major political election. The DC had governed the country without a break since the end of the Second World War, and now the levers of power were about to be reversed. What would the Communists do once they took power? Pajetta, Longo, Natta, Ingrao, Berlinguer, and Amendola. Perhaps even they had no real, exact idea. They were still old-school Communists who wore the ushanka hat and kissed Romanian and Bulgarian dictators three times on the cheeks, and went on their summer holidays to the Black Sea, but at the same time they were democratic parliamentarians with years of elected service behind them . . . Looming over their shoulders was the specter and the myth of the USSR.
My father sat with the big De Agostini–Novara atlas open wide on the living room table, studying the latitudes and seasonal temperatures of Canada, making plans to move us there before the Communists could seize control. We needed to move quickly, take care of everything in a few months’ time. “Anywhere they’ve taken power, legally or otherwise, they’ve refused to leave . . . And we know what their methods are like.” Canada was immense and virtually uninhabited. The whole family was going to emigrate to Canada, except for me; I could remain in Italy “to enjoy the delights” of the Communist dictatorship. This search for a country to run to lasted for a winter, this attempt to find a city less chilly and hostile. Papà was forty-eight years old: he devised a plan to get out of his business obligations, sell everything even if it meant a loss. Then the project was silently set aside, perhaps he just felt he was too old to start over again, that we were too fond of Rome, or else the red specter turned out not to be so threatening after all, and a strange fatalism won out. At the same time, along with the fear, there spread a realization that the Communists might not outstrip their rivals after all, that the takeover wasn’t inevitable: quite the opposite. The well-known and deplorable slogan was coined: “Let’s hold our noses and vote Christian Democrat,” and my father and mother obeyed that call, they who had always voted for the Liberal Party or the Republican Party, voted for the Christian Democrats to throw up a levee to hold off the Communist threat. Once again the crossed shield had been raised to halt an enemy from the East. In the 1975 elections (when I, too, was able to vote, for the very first time, thanks to the new law: and I voted for Proletarian
Democracy) both parties took bigger shares of the electorate, but the Christian Democrats sprinted ahead, reaching close to 40 percent, thanks to the votes designed to throw up a barrier, the votes of people like my parents—and they left the Communists in the dust. Four points behind, a collective sigh of relief. Back then in Italy, practically everyone voted Christian Democrat or Communist, without actually being either Christian Democrats or Communists. Those who wanted to defend their pocketbooks obviously voted against the Communists, but even a fair number of people who had money, a little or a lot, voted for the Communists, caught up in a sort of intoxication of change, or a spirit of self-punishment, as if they considered their good fortune to be a form of injustice, but they did so seemingly with the hope that in the end, the ones they were voting for wouldn’t win; or that if they did win, things might change, yes, but not too much. The founder of communism had decreed that the bourgeoisie has no reason to exist unless it subverts the given social relationships, and that view was confirmed once again, with the advent of a Communist bourgeoisie that still exists today, however ragtag and disheartened. The petit and middle and haute bourgeoisie, and the intellectual bourgeoisie, proves to be ubiquitous, capable of fighting both for its interests and against its interests, with the same impetus.
THIS GOES FOR THE POLITICS OF PARTIES, the parliament, elections, etc. Among us boys it was all far more schematic in nature. You were a right-winger or a left-winger. On the right or on the left, full stop. Impossible to avoid that choice, which was mandatory at every level of life, not merely in terms of political ideas, peremptory and also left frequently shrouded in vagueness after an initial pronunciamento, but even more so when it came to the language we used, the clothing we wore, the shape of our shoes, the way we wore our hair, the kind of school we attended and the model or color of the motor scooter or moped we rode to school and our tastes in music and movies, right or left, right or left, imposing a clear choice of alliance, once and for all, as it were. I know very few people who had the strength to resist the pull of these two poles, or perhaps they were merely driven by misanthropy or maladjustment, I couldn’t say, or even a general disinterest in life itself, because in those years, a boy’s life revolved around that aspect. I am not one of them. It’s not as if I repent or I’m ashamed now that I took a side, quite the contrary, and if I’m not ashamed it’s not because I’m convinced that I necessarily was on the right side, since doubts remain open and justifiable (as is the case in any given conflict, for that matter), that both parties to the conflict might well have been at fault, but rather because I have realized, only now, many years later, that the most authentic dilemma of those years wasn’t which side to fight for, but whether to fight at all.
Nowadays, rather hypocritically, it is stated that the real problem wasn’t even this, but rather a matter of which means ought to be used to fight: for example, whether or not to use violence? If you’ve used violent means, then the struggle was a mistaken one, whereas if you used peaceful means, then the struggle (the same struggle!) was right. Beats me. As if violence were optional, like having fog lights or a GPS navigator, which you can decide whether or not to turn on, when the time comes, or else leave them off entirely. To consider violence as something purely instrumental, a weapon, which you unearth or, to the contrary, you set aside, never entirely clarifies its meaning, and in truth makes it always possible, constantly imminent, you can always haul it out again, seeing that it has nothing to do with the essence of the ideas at whose service it is placed. According to pacifists, violence taints those ideas, according to others it makes them more tangible, and that is why at the same demonstrations in favor of the same ideas you will see protesters who allow themselves to be clubbed and other protesters who do their own clubbing, one group with cracked heads and the other group destroying everything in sight—perfect mirror images of each other, precisely complementary. Violence unfortunately cannot be added or withheld at will like a spice, violence just is, and it ought to be enough to examine ideas a little closer to see clearly that violence is not an element somehow alien to them, but rather a necessary component of them, even though you might disavow it, reject it out of hand. The conviction that violence is somehow only a means, a technical means, is typical of those who dream of how you can technically rid yourself of it entirely, just as we have eliminated progressively over the years so many other barbaric customs, thus displaying their ideals purified and innocent and immune to criticism. Often violence survives in those proponents in the form of an extreme and uncontrollable verbal virulence, a rabies that emerges in arguments and debates: eyes rolling, voice strident or choking, lips pulled back to bare the teeth (what is described in physiognomy as “miserable laughter,” indicative of outbursts of fear and anger). There are those, on the other hand, who imagine they can make use of it without scruples as long as they consider it appropriate, whereupon they can liquidate it from one day to the next, having attained the goals they had set themselves, and then there are those who enjoy it for what it can offer them at the moment: excitement, intoxication, play.
To make others into tools of your own will—that brings boundless pleasure. To constrain or convince (which are two very different things . . .) others to act as I please, as I choose—and contrary to what they please and choose. To win by all means against their resistance. By all means.
In politics, your adversary is whoever you inveigh against, and not the other way around. At the very moment you attack someone, that person automatically becomes your adversary. Adversaries can therefore be created in any and all occasions, and one can easily be replaced by another or several others, alternating them or taking them on all at once.
For that matter, if violence per se is a simple tool, what specific purpose is it being used for? What is it that we wish to attain by using it? Almost no one is capable of offering anything but the vaguest of answers to this question. The objective is almost always unspecified or generic while the concrete violence itself is right here, before us—fists, injuries, death.
(Let me open a parenthesis: in the CR/M, what was the actual purpose toward which the violence was employed? What was there that could not be obtained through other methods?)
If, on the other hand, violence is an end in itself, the only true objective of the action, then to what extent can that end be said to have been attained? At what stage of suffering on the part of the victim, seeing that there could always be a further stage, at least theoretically? With the victim’s death? Does death placate the violence, can it be said to have fulfilled its goal? With the victim’s death, the violence ceases, but it is by no means clear that it has thoroughly spent or vented itself. In a certain sense, then, one might say that death, instead of completion, constitutes an obstacle, a thwarting, the chief antidote against violence, its most ruthless and determined adversary—that when death ensues, it kills the violence along with its victim. If the purpose of violence is enjoyment, then death is the most unenjoyable mishap along the way, putting an end to the suffering of the victim, who indeed calls for it as a form of liberation. Perhaps this is what the defense lawyers in the CR/M case meant when they spoke of “accidental death”? Were they trying to say that never on earth would their clients have intentionally put an end to their amusement? Perhaps a murderer wants nothing from his victims.
IN THE MEANTIME, in my family we were always taught to minimize.
Always.
To normalize.
“Nothing’s happened.”
“No, please, don’t go to any trouble.”
“It’s absolutely not a problem for me.”
“Don’t think twice.”
“Never mind” (a rather mysterious expression, this “never mind,” what does it really mean?).
“Am I here at an inopportune moment?”
“Please, come right in.”
“It’s nothing, nothing a glass of water won’t take care of” (even if you’ve just been hit by a truck).
“I’ll get
over it.”
“Let’s drop it.”
“Let’s just forget about it.”
Drink without choking yourself eat with your mouth closed don’t talk so fast don’t talk nonsense sit properly facing forward chew your food thoroughly early to bed clean up your toys.
RESPECTABLE ACCEPTABLE SOBER discreet affable patient, in every public act he proceeds with the hand brake judiciously applied. It is solely by means of a thoroughgoing self-control that one can win respect, that same sentiment once in fact obtained by a lack of control, through freewheeling acts of strength or folly. The very same resentment that in a nobleman provokes an instant reaction, in the bourgeois seethes and simmers, lacerating the soul, daring to manifest itself only rarely. Infrequent occasions of venting: suddenly bursting into tears, a father’s profanities at the family dinner table, straight-armed slaps, insulting your relatives during holiday gettogethers.
The Catholic School Page 82
